Libya militias, gov’t loot EU funds for migrants

Moaz Mohamed

Over the past years, Libya has not only been a dangerous hotbed for terrorism, as that danger has extended to threaten the survival of everyone in the country, including diplomatic missions and even illegal immigrants detained in the prisons of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Fayez Al-Sarraj’s government, guarded by armed militia supported by Qatar and Turkey.

A report by AP said on December 31, 2020 that the misery of migrants in Libya has spawned a thriving and highly lucrative web of businesses funded in part by the EU and enabled by the United Nations.

According to the report, The EU has sent more than 327.9 million euros to Libya, with an additional 41 million approved in early December, largely channeled through U.N. agencies.

The report found that in a country without a functioning government, huge sums of European money have been diverted to intertwined networks of militiamen, traffickers and coast guard members who exploit migrants.

Even in some cases, U.N. officials knew militia networks were getting the money, according to internal emails.

A report by Doctors Without Borders published in December 23, 2019, said in the Dahr-el-Jebel detention centre, between the towns of Zintan and Yefren, nearly 500 people, most from Eritrea and Somalia, remain locked up.

The majority is stranded in this mountainous region, south of Tripoli, after being transferred there in September 2018 during armed clashes in the capital. Away from the immediate danger of the fighting, they were forgotten by almost everyone.

“When we began working there in May 2019, we were horrified to discover that at least 22 migrants and refugees had died of diseases, mainly tuberculosis,” the report said.

The International Organisation for Migrations (IOM) and UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) were supposed to provide assistance, including medical care and protection services. Today the medical situation remains worrying, according to the report.

The militias torture, extort and otherwise abuse migrants for ransoms in detention centers under the nose of the U.N., often in compounds that receive millions in European money, the AP investigation showed. Many migrants also simply disappear from detention centers, sold to traffickers or to other centers.

The same militias conspire with some members of Libyan coast guard units. The coast guard gets training and equipment from Europe to keep migrants away from its shores. But coast guard members return some migrants to the detention centers under deals with militias, the AP found, and receive bribes to let others pass en route to Europe.

The militias involved in abuse and trafficking also skim off European funds given through the U.N. to feed and otherwise help migrants, who go hungry. For example, millions of euros in U.N. food contracts were under negotiation with a company controlled by a militia leader, even as other U.N. teams raised alarms about starvation in his detention center, according to emails obtained by the AP and interviews with at least a half-dozen Libyan officials.

In many cases, the money goes to neighboring Tunisia to be laundered, and then flows back to the militias in Libya.

According to EU sources, some €336 million have been mobilized since 2014 for programs in connection with migrants in Libya under the EU Trust Fund for Africa, € 91.3 million of which has been spent on training and equipping Libya’s coast guard, among other things.

In May 2014, the EU called upon the Tripoli government and African countries to further address illegal immigration after rescue workers said they had plucked the bodies of 62 migrants from waters off the Libyan coast, a day after one of the deadliest shipwrecks in the Mediterranean in 2019.

The EU’s own documents show it was aware of the dangers of effectively outsourcing its migration crisis to Libya. Budget documents from as early as 2017 for a 90 million euro outlay warned of a medium-to-high risk that Europe’s support would lead to more human rights violations against migrants, and that the Libyan government would deny access to detention centers, AP reported.

About 5,000 migrants in Libya are crowded into between 16 and 23 detention centers at any given time, depending on who is counting and when. Most are concentrated in the west, where the militias are more powerful than the weak U.N.-backed government.